


The thrill of the chase moves in mysterious ways

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [9]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, TimeBaby Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 09:36:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1342669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Pregnant?!" he says again, and she bites her lip. "With a baby?”</p><p>"No, honey," she says, "with a velociraptor."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The thrill of the chase moves in mysterious ways

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: river/doctor; river is worried she won't make a good mother until the moment she holds her timebaby.

"I can do anything," River says, "I can diffuse any type of bomb on any planet from any time period. I can hack into the most complicated computer systems in the universe. The warden of Stormcage is all but my doorman, and I’d make you look like an idiot in a game of trivial pursuit."

"That’s because it’s trivial," the Doctor mutters. He sighs, pushing his work goggles up on his head and looking at River where she stands, wringing her hands and looking at him as though she wishes he weren’t there at all. "What’s this about?"

"I’m just saying, I’m a very capable person," River says, "more than capable, in fact. Exceptional, really, more brilliant than you if we’re being honest."

The Doctor glares at her, but he can only hold the expression for a second — River continues to wring her hands, and her eyes look tight and panicked. She pulls her lower lip between her teeth, and her whole body looks like it’s folding in on itself. He’s never seen River Song look so nervous.

Instead of getting defensive, he says, ”of course you are, River.”

"Of course I am," she echoes, not sounding at all like she heard what he said, nor what she herself said, for that matter.

The Doctor stands and approaches her, resting a palm against the side of her face.

"Are you quite alright?" he asks.

"Am I alright?"

"I’m asking you, dear," he says, brow furrowing. He brushes his hand from her cheek past her temple over her forehead, feeling for a fever but finding none. 

"I’m alright," she says after a moment, nodding. She swats away his hand, and he finds that more comforting than something like that ought to be. "I’m _fine_. Brilliant, weren’t you listening?”

The Doctor snorts. “Of course, dear. You still haven’t answered me, you know — what’s this about?”

She takes a deep breath and resets her shoulders, letting her hands fall to her sides and instantly looks more like herself. She pushes him back as he splutters until he falls into his swing under the console, takes another deep breath, and then claps a hand over his mouth when he goes to speak.

"I’m reminding you that I’m brilliant so that you know that I know I’m brilliant," she says. She lifts her hand from his mouth and he nods slowly, not understanding.

"Okay," he says.

She nods. “I don’t want you thinking I’m having some kind of crisis of self esteem or something, honey, you get quite pitiful when you think something needs fixing, and I won’t have my husband following me around like I’m some kind of — of — of — damsel. Understood?”

"Understood," he says. "But —"

"I can take out an entire battalion with a penknife," she says, "and I’ve mastered many forms of martial arts from many planets. Some kids grew up with C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, I grew up with Sun Tzu and Machiavelli."

"Yes — ?"

She takes another deep breath. “I just want you to have it fresh in your mind how dangerous I am so that when I tell you I’m pregnant you don’t start treating me like I’m made of glass. Getting on my nerves is not advisable, sweetie.”

The Doctor rolls his eyes. “I know, dear. I don’t know why you’d think I’d — wait. What was that?”

"The bit about the penknife?"

"No, after that."

"Getting on my nerves is not advisable?"

"No, no, no, hang on,” he says, wagging a finger at her, “did you just say pregnant?” He stands up from the swing, but immediately falls back down, jaw dropping open as she nods in confirmation. The nervous look is back, but the Doctor can hardly care about her face when he has no idea what to do with his.

"Pregnant?!" he says again, and she bites her lip. "With a _baby_?”

"No, honey," she says, "with a velociraptor."

"With a —" he pauses, shaking his head. " _Al_ right, shut up.”

"That’s all you have to say? I just told you I’m _pregnant_ and you tell me to shut up?” River says, crossly. She throws her hands up. “You great big _space_ idiot.”

She begins to stalk away, and she’s nearly gone from beneath the time rotor by the time the Doctor’s brain catches up and he leaps from his seat and nearly tackles her from behind — or, well, rather _does_ tackle her, and they fall to the floor in a heap of limbs and laughter as the Doctor positively beams at her.

"We’re having a baby?!" he says.

"We are," she says. 

"Or a velociraptor," he says.

"Oh, shut up, you oaf," she says, kissing him. They’re quiet for a few minutes, grinning and kissing and holding hands — all sorts of sentimentality that no one would ever expect from the Doctor and River Song. And then she says the thing he never thought he’d hear her say: "I’m scared, Doctor."

"River Song," he says, kissing her nose and squeezing her hand where it rests in his, "you once saved fifty million people from an atomic bomb using just that brilliant brain of yours and a bobby pin. A baby is nothing."

___

He tries to listen to her, tries not to treat her like she’s made of glass, but as she starts to show, he can’t help but want to lock her deep in a padded room in the TARDIS until she’s due. She’s just so reckless and headstrong — he’s attracted to trouble, certainly, but she causes it. She doesn’t slow down at all in the first few months, not that he expected her to, but some nights when they’re curled together in bed and he rests his hand on her stomach, he can hear her heartbeats lurch into double time.

"Dear?"

She hums.

"Remember when we accidentally-on-purpose offended the emperor of Gemini and you got us out of prison by convincing the guard you and the emperor had switched bodies and you needed to stop the impostor and put things back to normal before sundown, when they would become permanent?"

She hums again, and he presses a kiss to her shoulder.

"Having a baby will be much, much easier than that," he says. 

She doesn’t respond, but he can feel her heartbeats slow and her breath even out as she falls asleep.

___

They stop in London for pies in the little shop she loves along the South Bank of the Thames, looking out over the water and talking about nothing while they eat. She’s barely showing, now, and she’s taken to wearing looser tops, he’s sure, so she shows even less — but he knows without her clothes on, there’s a definite curve to her abdomen that has never been there before. She catches him staring at her and blushes slightly — he finds that she does that more, since being pregnant, and she blames hormones whenever he brings it up.

She’s in the middle of laughing when a couple with a baby stops nearby, and he follows her eyes as they snap to the child. She pales slightly, one hand unconsciously going to rest on her belly, the other crumbling her napkin in her hand until her knuckles turn white. 

He reaches out to grab the one on the table, bringing it to his lips to kiss the back until she relaxes it and looks at him with wide eyes.

"When we were fighting those Sontarans, at that Christmas ball," he says, "and they cornered us at the end of that hallway, and you’d left your blaster in your wristlet on the table? You told them your name and they all but threw themselves at your feet in terror."

She smiles thinly, the tension sliding from her face.

“ _Sontarans_ , River,” he says, “you made _Sontarans_ throw in the towel. And you’re worried about a little time baby. Please.”

___

They try to go dancing, but River’s dresses won’t fit. The Doctor watches her biting back tears that she refuses to acknowledge as she tries on dress after dress, until finally the TARDIS gives her one in her size, but the moment she sets eyes on the number on the tag, she bursts into tears. He thinks that one day after the baby’s born, he’ll remind River of this moment and she’ll laugh with him for days — River Song, feared and respected throughout the cosmos, crying over a dress size — but right now he knows she can’t help it, and knows she probably hates feeling so out of control.

He takes her to the shop he’d gotten her green dress from, and has them make her a new one from scratch, in her precise measurements, which they’re not permitted to tell her. The new dress is deep blue with metallic threads woven in the precise hue that only appears in the right light; she looks like a piece of the sky. She twirls in the mirror, trying not to look too pleased, although he can tell she is. She looks stunning, not that she ever doesn’t, but he thinks he finally understands what humans mean when they talk about a glow — she’s resplendent, her eyes are one million watts, and he walks up behind her to kiss the side of her neck, resting his hands on her ever-widening waist.

"You look _amazing_ ,” he says.

"I look fat," she says. She doesn’t sound upset about it, merely like she’s making note. He watches her run her palms over her stomach where the dress bulges noticeably, but gracefully.

"You look pregnant," he corrects, covering her hand where it rests on her own stomach. He sees her bite her lip and adds, "you remember the ball we went to on my birthday — or, you know, that day you decided was my birthday, just for that once? You were still in University."

"Yes," she says, the corners of her lips twitching upward in a smile.

"I ended up strung up by my ankles dangling over a boiling pot of water surrounded by a cult of flesh-eating slug people."

"It was an interesting night," she says.

"You got me out of there using your shoes and a rope from the supply closet," he says. "I wouldn’t worry about the belly, dear."

___

When she’s six months along, she looks like she’s swallowed a planet, and he tells her as much. She laughs at him and makes him take her to a curry restaurant in Leadworth she’d gone to as Mels. As they eat, she tells him about all the things Amy and Rory had talked about doing as kids that she herself had never experienced, having had the unconventional and horrible upbringing she’d had. She trails off at a certain point, and he can see her clenching her jaw as she looks down where her hands rest over her abdomen, and so he asks her to tell him about that time she’d stolen a bus, and after she does, he laughs. “See?” he tells her, “you know all the tricks in the book. Our child won’t get anything past you.”

___

When she’s seven-and-a-half months, the baby starts moving, often and quickly. It’s their child, the Doctor says, _of course_ it can’t sit still. He realizes it was the wrong thing to say the moment he says it, and he can see the worry lines forming between her brows. He reminds her of a city they saved, of the super computer she’d hacked in a language she barely spoke, and smoothes the line away with his finger.

___

She’s eight months along and can barely move, although she craves strange things at odd hours of the night — he’ll gladly take it in exchange for a River who is physically incapable of going on adventures, because the anxiety she gave him up until this point was enough to have given any human at least a dozen heart attacks with her antics. She’s mostly confined to the TARDIS. She reads a lot, then, and one morning he finds her in the library with a wild look in her eyes, hunched over a parenting book that rests on her enormous stomach.

He sets her tea down on the end table beside her and begins to massage her shoulders as she reads. When he feels how tense she is, he reaches over her to take the book away, kissing her neck and continuing to rub her shoulders. She sighs, letting her head loll back into him as he presses his hands into her tight muscles and reminds her of the space station she’d put back in orbit once. When he feels her relax, her grabs her hand and walks her to the shelves in the back that the TARDIS keeps from everyone but him, and gives her stacks upon stacks of children’s books from Gallifrey, and they spend the rest of the night trading kisses and silly rhymes in Gallifreyan.

___

When the baby’s born, she’s calmer than she has any right to be, and he’s a wreck. He paces and tugs his hair and yells at the TARDIS and squeezes her hand until his knuckles are white, not hers, and when it’s all said and done, he’s completely exhausted — but there’s a baby in his arms. A very real, very healthy baby girl with two hearts and a shock of curly, red hair and eyes like her mother’s and a nose reminds him of Rory, poor thing, and he doesn’t remember the last time he felt so overwhelmed with love and gratitude.

He’s been terrified, honestly. There were so many complications to the idea of the two of them having a baby — people would want to get to their daughter, to hurt them, or to get their hands on a shiny new Time Lord. Neither he nor River handled domesticity well, and their dangerous lives weren’t exactly childproof. Still, he’d realized the moment River told him the news that he wanted this baby more than anything in the universe, and looking at her small, perfect face in his arms, he knows he’ll do anything to keep her safe. 

When he hands her to River, he watches his wife’s face; River’s been more afraid than he’s ever seen her these past nine months. She didn’t know how to be a mother, she told him some nights, she hadn’t been raised by her mother, and as much as she loved Amy, their relationship wasn’t normal by any means. He waits for her nerves to return, but there’s nothing but bliss on her face as she looks down at their new baby girl.

The Doctor leans down to kiss his daughter’s head, and then River’s cheek.

"Can I get you anything?" he asks. "Do you — feel alright?" He starts to flounder for some other story of her bravery, to remind her how brilliant and capable she is, but his mind is so full of everything that he stutters for a second before she laughs and cuts him off.

"Oh, my love," she says, "don’t worry. You’ve given me everything I need."


End file.
